Research overview

My major specialism is corpus linguistics - specifically, the methodology of corpus linguistics, and how it can be applied to different areas of study in linguistics and beyond. I am currently working on applications of corpus methods in the social sciences and humanities. I am also very interested in the use of corpus-based methods to study languages other than English, especially the languages of Asia, with an especial focus on issues in descriptive and theoretical grammar.

PhD supervision

I am willing to consider PhD applications in areas coherent with my research interests. I am especially eager to supervise students in the following two areas:
- The development of new corpus-based methods, or the extension of existing methodologies;
- The application of these methods in different areas of the humanities and social sciences.

I am also interested to supervise projects that extend established corpus methods to "new" languages - non-European languages and minority languages in particular - especially with regard to topics in descriptive or theoretical grammar.

See below for an indicative list of topics studied by my current and previous PhD supervisees.

Professional Role

AS well as holding the position of Lecturer in Linguistics, I am Deputy Director of the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science, a major research project running for five years from April 2013.

I am also currently the Chair of UCREL, the corpus research centre which beings together researchers from the Linguistics and Computing departments. (From 2005 to 2012 I was Project Development Officer.)

Research Interests

My primary research specialism is the corpus-based methodology and its applications. In particular, I am interested in a range of areas relating to corpus design and construction and corpus analysis methods and software tools, and how these may be applied to my own subject area (broadly: the grammar of English and other languages), to other fields of linguistics such as discourse analysis or language teaching, and to other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences.

Most of my current research work is focused on a series of projects in which corpus methods are adapted to the needs of social scientists and humanists, in a range of subject areas including Psychology, Geography, History and English Literature.

Areas that I have worked on (and published in) earlier in my career include:

quantitative and collocational approaches to grammar in English and other languages;

historical text-mining, with particular regard to the journalism of the Early Modern English period;

A major part of my work involves software development to support the corpus methodologies listed above. I am one of the lead developers of Corpus Workbench, a powerful, open-source system for corpus indexing and querying. Furthermore, I created (and continue to develop) the CQPweb system as a user-friendly front-end to the Corpus Workbench.

As part of my work on the EMILLE corpus of South Asian languages, I created the Unicodify software. While working on part-of-speech tagging for South Asian languages including Urdu and Nepali, I developed the Unitag framework.

Current Teaching

I am currently attached full-time to a research project and therefore am not active in our general undergraduate and postgraduate teaching. I still supervise research students and teach on our postgraduate Summer School programmes.